rty.
Calling names should be left to children, with whom, as with too large
a class of our political speakers, it seems to pass for argument. We
believe it never does so with the people; certainly not with the
intelligent, who make a majority among them, unless (as in the case of
"Copperhead") there be one of those hardly-to-be-defined realities
behind the name which they are so quick to detect. We cannot say that
we have any great sympathy for the particular form of mildness which
discovers either a "martyr," or a "pure-hearted patriot," or even a
"lofty statesman," in Mr. Jefferson Davis, the latter qualification of
him having been among the discoveries of the London _Times_ when
it thought his side was going to win; but we can say that nothing has
surprised us more, or seemed to us a more striking evidence of the
humanizing influence of democracy, than the entire absence of any
temper that could be called revengeful in the people of the North
toward their late enemies. If it be a part of that inconsistent mixture
of purely personal motives and more than legitimate executive action
which Mr. Johnson is pleased to call his "policy,"--if it be a part of
that to treat the South with all the leniency that is short of folly
and all the conciliation that is short of meanness,--then we were
advocates of it before Mr. Johnson. While he was yet only ruminating in
his vindictive mind, sore with such rancor as none but a "plebeian," as
he used to call himself, can feel against his social superiors, the
only really agrarian proclamation ever put forth by any legitimate
ruler, and which was countersigned by the now suddenly "conservative"
Secretary of State, we were in favor of measures that should look to
governing the South by such means as the South itself afforded, or
could be made to afford. It is true that, as a part of the South, we
reckoned the colored people bound to us by every tie of honor, justice,
and principle, but we never wished to wink out of sight the natural
feelings of men suddenly deprived of what they conceived to be their
property,--of men, too, whom we respected for their courage and
endurance even in a bad cause. But we believed then, as we believe now,
and as events have justified us in believing, that there could be no
graver error than to flatter our own feebleness and uncertainty by
calling it magnanimity,--a virtue which does not scorn the society of
patience and prudence, but which cannot subsist apar